Ode to Mixed Girls by Karla Nemanic
This poem is an ode for mixed girls,
For girls who are fetishized as
Cream, as Latte, as Cocoa
By the boys at their new school,
For girls who carry liters of sunscreen
Instead of liters of Coke in their hand-me-down purses
To stay on their fathers’ good sides,
And for girls who burn a brown plea into their skin
Because that’s the only way they know
To connect to their culture.
This is for girls who have a different culture in each eye,
A different side of the conversation sounding in each ear,
Girls with two parts
That are often mistaken for two faces,
Girls called gringa
In one home and mutt
In the other.
This is for girls with an abuelita who clucks her tongue,
Who rolls her eyes and laughs in a series of puffs
And ignores her brown daughters once a blonde one is born.
This is for the daughters of those brown daughters,
For girls with Black Panther grandpas and
White savior fathers whose eyes are holes chiseled to the sky.
This is for girls who don’t have time to look at the sky
Because they’re too busy deciding if they’re more nacho or cracker
And can identify a coco from the gossip of Mamá
But can’t be identified by Mamá.
This is for girls who get stopped by security guards and police officers
Whenever they’re with Mamá
But can go anywhere they want when they’re with Dad.
This is for girls who don’t look like anyone else in the family,
Who are the inverted coconut
Who are looking for ways to describe themselves
Like “Chocolate Eclair” or “Burrito”
But who settle on “desilusión” because
That’s all they are anyway — disappointment.
This is for girls who are anything but a disappointment,
Girls who learn to bake el pan before they learn to walk
And know how to keep a can of off-brand condensed milk
From exploding on the stove.
This is for the girls who put unnecessary
Definite articles in front of the nouns in the English
But hardly have a vocabulary en el español to show for it,
And for girls with glassy eyes who inherited
Features more Conquistador than Conquered.
This is for girls who are both the conquistador and the conquered,
Girls with blood running through their veins
Like the oceans that were crossed to make them
And minds like the civilizations reduced to gaunt protestors
Squatting on the lands stolen from them,
Girls with the noses of the men who forced themselves on
The antepasadas who passed down their lips
Who don’t know the lives of their twentieth great-grandmothers
But learn the languages of their pillagers.
This is for girls who look just as much as their mothers’ oppressors
As they do their mothers,
For girls who feel the warm rawhide grip of the sword in their hands
As much as they do the tear of its jagged blade down their backs.
This is for girls who will tear a blade down your back,
Girls whose default is eighty-five decibels
Who squeeze between primos at a wooden dinner table
That stretches to the ends of the room
And still doesn’t accommodate everybody,
Girls who call you a weakling if you put any less
Than four cloves of garlic in your pesto
And who learned to fight early
So they could stay for sobremesa and debate.
This is for girls who are told to pick a side,
Who are told that a side has been picked
Because their mothers speak English at home
And their tías have vitiligo
Which means that they’re white now.
This is for girls who are bridges that connect two lands
And belong to neither.
For girls whose brains are so choked by the judgments of others
That they no longer have the space to crawl into the folds of themselves
And find their own thoughts.
And this is for girls who can hardly pick a damn foundation shade
Because not even mirrors are clear enough for them to see
Who they are.
Karla Nemanic is an English and International Affairs major at the University of Georgia. From plays to prose to poetry, she experiments with writing in all its forms, and when not writing, she enjoys painting cannibalistic scenes and baking bread.
